How building an app for his kid led Shailesh Khare to startup LogTera

This story is a part of ”Startup Spotlight’ series where we discover inspiring early stage startup stories which have been powered by the .com/.net domains. This is a series sponsored by Verisign. YourStory exercises full editorial control over these posts.

As operator of the infrastructure for .com and .net, Verisign enables the world to connect online with reliability and confidence, anytime, anywhere.

Shailesh Khare is a Pune based entrepreneur who has had several years of experience in development, technical architecture and e-learning platforms. A believer in the potential of e-learning, Shailesh developed a simple app for his two year old to educate him about animals and the sounds they made. Shailesh just wanted to experiment how it works but thee results amazed him. His kid could grasp things very quickly and this led Shailesh to extend what had worked.

Shailesh was friends with Rahul Jauhari for more than 10 years. Rahul is based in the Silicon Valley and has several years of experience in Business Development, Strategic Marketing, Product Management, and Analytics. The two of them discussed the idea and thought of building a company that would develop educational apps for kids. "The fact that my kid learnt all that the app had within a few days on his own inspired me even more to do similar kind of work for older kids too," says Shailesh. They did some market research and validation, and went live on the App Store. Over the last year, they have 15 educational aps live.

The name LogTera also has an interesting story. It is derived from two words of mathematics , Logarithm and Tera. Logarithm is to simplify calculations and Tera is a big number "1012 or 1000000000000" , this implies their goal to simplify mathematics up to a huge extent. "We looked around for the domain and found it.

.edu and .org are usually institutions and mostly company uses .com. Hence, we went ahead with LogTera.com," says Shailesh.

With 1.3 billion students world wide and mobile device pervasiveness, LogTera believes that the K-12 education is ready for disruption as its transitions from a class centric to a student centric model. "In today's fast changing era kids need to learn and remember lots and lots of things so surely learning need to be a fun and memorable experience for them. This thought gave us the idea to build interactive, gamified and personalized apps for K-5 education," says Shailesh.

They have 15 apps live on the Apple store and have a team of software engineers, content developers and a graphic designer that builds thee apps. The development happens in India while marketing and business activities are taken care at USA office lead by Rahul. "We have Mobile, Cloud Computing and Big Data experts working with us along with experience educators and content developers," says Rahul. Completely bootstrapped, LogTera sustains via revenue generated from Paid apps and In-App Purchases. "We are working on cross platform cloud service, which will be per user per month subscription basis," says Rahul.

They are targeting the US market mainly. The numbers LogTera is looking at:

"We are targeting around 10% of mobile users. Schools in USA and home users in USA & India are our biggest segments," says Shailesh. LogTera is in an interesting space and with a sustainable business, it can move into many possible directions.